Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Komako is the main character in the book Snow Country,
by Yasunari Kawabata, first published in 1947 and translated by Eward
Seidensticker. We see her only through the point of view of Shimamura, who has
come from Tokyo to spend time at a hot springs resort in Komako’s village.
Shimamura, a critic of the Western ballet though he has never seen one, is
surprised by Komako’s freshness. “It seemed to Shimamura that she must be clean
to the hollows under her toes.” She is not a geisha at this time, though she
has trained as one. She is just 19.

Nozawa Mountain Shrine, Japan

Shimamura makes several visits to the hot spring resort at
different seasons, drawn to Komako. She keeps a diary and studies the samisen, a guitar-like musical instrument having a long neck and three strings,
from sheet music as there is no one to teach her. When Komako first plays for
him, Shimamura is transported. “The notes went out crystalline into the clean
winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.” He cannot believe she is as
good as she sounds, that practicing alone has led her to take on this special
power. He feels that her playing, indeed her life, is wasted in this remote
mountain village.

Komako falls in love with Shimamura. He is someone who can
see who she is. By his second visit, she has become a mountain geisha, making
money by spending time with resort guests, serving and entertaining them. But
she leaves her parties and comes to his room at the hotel again and again at
odd hours of the night, often drunk. At first she tries to hide her attraction
to this guest, but later gives up. She has her clothes, her samisen brought to
the hotel. She and Shimamura bathe together, intimate and domesticated.

Shimamura is entranced by the “strange magical wildness” of
this young woman. A sensualist, none of the beauty of the seasons is lost on
him. But other than being a connoisseur, he has little life of his own. Komako
takes him to her rooms, first a room in which silkworms have been kept, later a
room over a candy shop. She explains her geisha contracts, tells him
everything. She is connected to the village, to the music teacher and her son,
who both die, and to Yoko, whom she feels is her burden. Shimamura falls into
the habit of waiting for Komako’s frequent visits, but in the end it becomes
clear to Shimamura that he must leave, that Komako belongs to her village, that
she will go, as she says, “pleasantly to seed in the mountains.”

The utter strangeness of the world I first encountered in Snow
Country has become for me now familiar. Having read it many times, I am
always moved by the intimacy of these two very different people, as well as by
the startling drama of the natural world Kawabata describes. “High up the
mountain, the kaya grass spread out silver in the sun, like the autumn sunlight
itself pouring over the face of the mountain. Ah, I am here, something in
Shimamura called out as he looked up at it.”

Komako’s passion for Shimamura is expressed very delicately,
but clearly. She is delighted to find someone with whom she can share the
details of her life, which she has only been able to share with her diary.
Komako is a gifted young woman who works for her living in a beautiful village
along the west coast of Japan. “Her cheeks still carried the ruddiness of her
north-country childhood. In the moonlight the fine geisha-like skin took on the
luster of a sea shell.” Because he comes from the city, Shimamura sees Komako
as entirely of her place, her home. It is how I see her too. I feel the utter
honesty of Snow Country and love what I am able to see of Komako. It has
enlarged my concept of who I can be, a woman for whom nature is enough.

Note to Readers: Before I was thirty I had set up a canon of
“five books” which were to be my education. The women in each of the books
excited me as much as the intellectual adventures detailed in them. One of the
five books was Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata. After meditating on
these books for almost fifteen years, I wrote an essay called “Stone Books: An
Education,” 1990. In it, it is easy to see the preoccupations of the five books
reflecting off one another. Since it is too long to post in a blog (nine
pages), I offer it to anyone who would like to see it in a .pdf format. Email me at lightlyheldbooks at gmail dot
com to request it.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Abelone Brahe, a character in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke, first published in 1910, is the youngest
sister of Malte’s mother. Malte is in love with her, but he says that in his
notebooks he will say nothing about her. “Only wrong would be done in the
telling,” he says. “One cannot say anything about a woman.” But Malte finds himself writing
about women a good deal.

Malte Laurids Brigge has lost the Danish ancestral home, the
dogs, the inherited things around which he could have lived comfortably. He
lives in Paris, a solitary. His dislocation is such that he believes he may be
close to madness. He spends his time in the streets, the libraries and museums
of Paris, recording the progress of the new individual he is becoming in his
notebooks. He is very lonely and he endlessly writes down stories of his
family, of the many deaths he has seen and the ghosts that remain.

But he is also certain that solitude is the price he must
pay to see reality. “I marvel sometimes how readily I give up everything I
expected for the reality, even when the reality is bad.” He notices many young
girls drawing in museums, wondering why they too needed to leave
home. “They have already begun to look about, to search; they, whose strength
has always lain in being found.” But it comes of weariness, Malte thinks. Women
have, for centuries, done the whole work of love. He wonders whether men might
start to learn this work, now that so much is changing. The notebooks,
which begin with the records of many deaths, turn to a meditation on love.

Abelone remains mysterious, seen only in an idyllic
description of her in the garden in summer, stripping currants out of their
clusters with a fork. She leads Malte to Bettina von Arnim, “whose love was equal
to everything,” and whose collected letters to Goethe are among the few books
from which Malte never parts. Goethe was not equal to her, Malte thinks. “Is
not the whole world of your making? For how often you have set it afire with
your love,” he says of Bettina.

Throughout The Notebooks Abelone links Malte to his home. She doesn’t marry. As
a young person, her father finds that she too burns a candle early in the
morning writing and requests her to take down his memoirs. These chronicle the aristocratic salons of his time, and particularly the German
literary circle of Julie Reventlow, though he dies before he can tell Abelone
much about this woman whom he considered a saint. Malte tells us no more about
Abelone, though he sometimes talks to her. He describes a magnificent tapestry
to her. “I think you would understand,” he writes. Hearing a singer in Venice,
he thinks, “Abelone.”

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge speak to me of
the painful inner process Jung called individuation. This understanding of one’s
unique self and destiny, in Jung’s terms, allows one to forge an ego that “does
not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that
endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate.”
[Memories, Dreams and Reflections, C.G. Jung, 1961]

I was one of those young girls who had left home for the
city. For me too, seeing reality was worth the price. I was less worried about love
than Malte, steeped in the rich atmosphere of a loving family, Christian in the
best sense of the word. But I was determined to become the one my inner self
wished to be. The Notebooks celebrate the uniqueness of the
individual on his lonely quest. Abelone remains the good angel hovering over
Malte, not particularly knowable, but blessing his adventure in modernity with
her spirit. Mine too.

Note to Readers: Before I was thirty I had set up a canon of
“five books” which were to be my education. The women in each of the books
excited me as much as the intellectual adventures detailed in them. One of the
five books was The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rilke. After
meditating on these books for almost fifteen years, I wrote an essay called
“Stone Books: An Education,” 1990. In it, it is easy to see the preoccupations
of the five books reflecting off one another. Since it is too long to post in a
blog (nine pages), I offer it to anyone who would like to see it in a .pdf
format. Email me at at
lightlyheldbooks at gmail dot com to request it.

About Me

Review Copies

For the favor of a review on Amazon, Goodreads or a circulating magazine, review copies of books by Connie Kronlokken are now available. Please send your request plus name and address to lightlyheldbooks@gmail.com.